


Who the Fuck is this Library Boy: the Musical

by mullroy



Series: CSNB AU [1]
Category: Something Rotten! - Kirkpatrick/Kirkpatrick/O'Farrell
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 08:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11824434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mullroy/pseuds/mullroy
Summary: Nostradamus breaks his nose.(Teen rating due to a lot of swearing, on the part of both Nostradamus and the narrative.)





	Who the Fuck is this Library Boy: the Musical

Tom loves his major, he really does. Philosophy is… just cool. It’s cool. He likes it. In the distant future he’s going to get a PhD and become a cool professor with a tweed coat and it’s going to be great. The issue is that in the present, his major is requiring him to take Chemistry 1030 and, in the rapidly impending future, Chemistry 1030 is requiring him to take a test. His entire soul is requiring him to take a fucking nap.

The hallway around him continues to be full of people and obnoxiously loud. He puts his face in his hands to concentrate.

So he’s got two hours left on this mortal plane before Chemistry kills him. It’s a ten minute walk to his parking space, then a fifteen minute drive to his uncle’s house, and it would take him let’s-say-ten minutes to wake himself up enough to do the drive then the walk back, so if he leaves now he can sleep for… a… while.

His brain might have been replaced with steel wool when he wasn’t looking.

Drive plus walk is... 25 minutes. Wait, is the walk actually fifteen minutes? Drive plus walk is either 25 or 30 minutes, that twice is either 50 or 60 minutes, how long was it going to take him to wake up? ...He doesn’t recognize this part of the building; he must have missed his staircase. He turns around.

He can crash in the library, right? That’s something college students do.

It’s hot as balls outside, which does not do much for Tom's current hatred of life, the universe, and everything. Willing himself to dissociate enough to lose his sense of temperature doesn’t help in the slightest.

It doesn’t occur to him that he could have taken off his jacket until after he gets into the library air conditioning.

The library is more populated than he expected, which complicates his original idea.

He wanders from floor to floor at random for awhile (avoiding the coffee shop, since he doesn't have the spare executive dysfunction to decide if he can afford a mocha), but "quiet study area" appears to be more of a guideline than a rule. Usually, he could listen to music to drown out the talking, but he also managed to forget his headphones because apparently today is Hell Day. He goes downstairs and walks around the basement, which is quiet, but also has nothing to sleep on but tiled floor.

Tom checks his phone. He's wasted twenty minutes on this shit so far. Great.

He walks around the basement again.

On his third circuit of the basement, Tom notices a strangely-angled wall. He squints at it. Okay, it's a door. It's nearly behind some display cases. He doesn't think it's actively being hidden, but he's walked past it several times without seeing it.

It looks like a normal door. It's got the standard little plaque with the room number in block text and braille, but no apparent sign saying what the room is for. It also doesn't have the narrow window.

With the embarrassed caution that comes from recognizing the possibility that a door may lead into another dimension, Tom opens it and peers inside.

The room is dim, it has weirdly organized bookshelves, and there's a sofa jammed into a corner. It's... a deserted storage room. With a couch. Maybe this day will be salvageable. Tom flings the door open.

He gets about three steps into the room before he trips over the soles of his shitty sneakers.

His face connects brutally with the armrest of the couch. On the bright side, he’s on the couch, which is where he had been going in the first place.

He groans.

It’s partially at the pain, partially at the indignity… mostly just at the state of life. Tom observes, distantly, that he may have just broken his nose. Maybe he’s dead? More importantly, this is probably the least comfortable couch in existence.

He lets his face slide off of the armrest and shuts his eyes.

Somebody clears their throat.

Tom makes a strangled noise something like the vocal equivalent of “?!”, then very casually folds himself into the kind of sitting pose that conveys ‘I faceplant onto couches on purpose’ and ‘I knew you were here’. He makes (cool, casual) eye contact with the guy (that this non-deserted room evidently contains) sitting behind the reception desk (that this non-storage room evidently contains).

The guy stares back at him. “Can I… help you?”

“Uh.”

Okay, so the ‘deserted’ ‘storage’ room is home to… some sort of librarian. A librarian with curly brown hair and dorky glasses. With a polo shirt and a skullcap and a regrettable need to know why Tom is on his couch. ...The American edition of Giles from Buffy just watched Tom trip and eat shit. The day is not salvageable. Help.

“Were you looking for something?” Giles asks, after what was probably a long pause.

Tom doesn’t actually say “a reprieve from humanity in general”, but it’s a close thing. Instead, he says “uh” again.

“This is the rare books section,” Giles prompts.

“Not the… uh. Convenient deserted room section?”

He quirks an eyebrow in a way that Tom can’t read—amused, or annoyed. “No.”

“Oh no. I took a wrong turn.”

Giles huffs a laugh. Then his eyes go wide, which Tom assumes is regret at having encouraged the dumb joke, until he says “You, uh, your nose-”

Tom crosses his eyes, which doesn’t really show him anything.

Giles laughs again (a little more hysterically) and clarifies: “Your nose is bleeding.”

“Oh.” Tom uncrosses his eyes in time to watch blood drip onto his shirt. “Oh, fuck.”

In a moment of panic, he nearly puts his sleeve to his nose, but then he remembers that he likes this jacket. He twitches his arm awkwardly, then just sits still and lets his nose blood continue to ruin his shirt. If he's lucky, maybe it will also ruin this stupid couch.

He and Giles spend a moment staring at each other in horrified silence.

"So-" he says, at the same time Giles yelps "Shoot I think there's a first aid kit in back let me go get-" and scrambles off.

After a couple minutes, he comes back with a tissue box and an apologetic look.

Tom walks to the reception desk, takes a tissue, and puts it to his nose. He and Giles stare at each other again.

“I think you tilt your head back,” Giles says.

“Huh?”

“Isn’t that supposed to make it stop bleeding, or… bleed less?”

Tom shrugs. “No idea, I’ve never had a nosebleed before.”

Giles shrugs back. “Me neither.”

Tom tilts his head back. This, like everything he does right now, hurts. "Ow."

“…dude, how hard did you hit that couch?”

“That was on purpose,” Tom mumbles through the tissue.

“Breaking your nose on a couch was on purpose?”

“Yes,” he says firmly.

He stares at the ceiling. How long are you supposed to keep your head like this? Maybe he can fall asleep leaning on the reception desk and when he wakes up it will have stopped. The ceiling here is fucking boring. Sleeping might be a bad idea, actually. He'd probably fall over and get his nose double broken. The ceiling tiles don't even have a shitty confetti pattern. Man, is his nose  _still_ bleeding? 

"Hey, Sh-" Giles cuts himself off, looking a little abashed. "Sorry, what's your name?"

Tom raises his eyebrows. “I’m Thomas Nostradamus, but you can call me… anytime.” Hm. So his brain-to-mouth filter has given up for the day.

Startlingly, Giles actually laughs at that. “I’m-”

He does say something, but Tom misses it because he’s busy violently wincing. Apparently smiling moves your nose. He very casually plays it off as a suppressed sneeze.

Giles seems to have seen past the ruse, though, because the next thing out of his mouth is “Do you want an aspirin?” followed quickly by “wait, that’s a blood thinner, no.”

Shit, he missed Giles' real name completely. It would be awkward as hell to ask again... and way worse to accidentally call him 'Giles', which will inevitably happen at some point if Tom doesn't start thinking of this guy by his real name soon. Luckily, Giles— _he—_ has a name tag to cheat off of. Tom very subtly eyes it. "Thanks, Shylock, but I'm good with the bleeding I'm already doing."

Gi-  _Shylock_ quirks an eyebrow again, but he’s smiling, so this time definitely means ‘amused’. “Okay. Do you want to sit down?”

Tom pulls himself up onto the reception desk.

Shylock moves over to make room. “I meant on the couch.”

“Your couch sucks.”

“Yeah, fair enough.”

"...Also, please call me Tom."

"What?"

"Like, instead of Thomas. I wasted the but-you-can-call-me part of the introduction on the dumb pick-up line."

Shylock puts his face in his hands and shakes gently. It takes Tom a second to identify that he's giggling very quietly.

"Okay, Tom."

There's a beat of companionable silence long enough that Tom nearly starts mentally critiquing the ceiling tiles again.

"So, I was going to ask... what were you actually doing here, anyway?"

Tom shrugs. "Looking for a place to sleep."

"Oh. I guess you can if you want to."

"Nah, I'm good."

Shylock smiles. "Well, feel free."

Tom narrowly avoids smiling back, then realizes his nose blood is seeping onto his hands. "You got a trash can?"

Shylock gestures at it.

Tom chucks his tissue, grabs handful of fresh ones, and puts them to his nose. He tilts his head back again.

“That is the worst nosebleed I have ever seen,” Shylock muses.

Tom gives Shylock the best dubious look he can manage without moving his face. “You’ve never had a nosebleed.”

“That doesn’t mean I’ve never seen one.”

“So… on TV?”

Shylock grins. “Okay, that is where I saw the tilt-your-head-back thing.”

“Knew it.”

“…But seriously, you should maybe see a doctor.”

“I’m a college student.”

"I can relate, but you might have broken your actual face."

Tom takes the tissues away from his face and tilts his head towards Shylock. "Does it  _look_ broken?"

There is a very long pause while Shylock stares at him. "...no."

"Then I'll save the $500 and get $15 of medicinal weed."

Shylock sighs. “How long has it been bleeding, anyway?”

"A... while?"

Shylock digs his phone out of his pocket. “It’s 3:50, how long have you been here?”

Long enough that he’s nearly late for Chem. “Fuck.”

“What?”

“I have to go. I have class.”

“Oh.” Shylock looks nearly as thrown off as Tom feels. “Okay, uh… bye?”

“Bye,” Tom agrees, sliding off the desk.

“Are you going to be okay?”

 _Absolutely not,_ Tom thinks. “What?”

“You- your nose.”

“Oh. Yeah, probably, why not.”

Shylock gives him a half-smile. “If you say so.”

Tom nods, then shoves a few handfuls of extra tissues into his jacket pockets. Looks at Shylock. Looks at the tissue box. "Can I... take this?"

"Hey, you need it more than I do."

"Thanks, dude." He tucks it under his arm and turns to go.

Tom's already half out the door when he hears, quietly, “Hey, uh…”

He pauses, turns around. “Yeah?”

“If… if you ever need somewhere to crash between classes...” Shylock gestures in a way that might indicate the couch and might indicate the reception desk, and shrugs.

Tom beams. “I’d... yeah. Yeah, thanks.”

**Author's Note:**

> Assuming Tom and Shylock's university is basically just the Michigan version of my university, Chem 1030 is an engineering chemistry course that a philosophy major would absolutely never have to take. I took artistic liberties because I hated that class so fucking much.
> 
> Also, when Shylock said "Hey, Sh-" he was just about to call Tom "Shaggy".
> 
> Welcome to the first fic I've written in six years and the start of the CSNB AU.


End file.
